Humanity is the Good News.

 It is hard to imagine Christianity without God. But how do we know God in 2023?

Some 2000 years ago God rescued God’s image among humans in first century Israel by restoring the image of God in humanity through the Incarnation. The inhumanity of humans in their treatment of one another had completely obscured image of the the loving God who created us in God’s image. Only the restoration of humanity could and can restore human faith in God. 

And that is what God incarnate in Jesus did, from the beginning of his ministry to its end. 

Humanity, despite our efforts,  isn’t something any of us can possess in ourselves. it exists only through processes of mutual humanization. Adam became complete only when they became a social creature, and ever since God placed in their hands the task of creating new humans, our humanity has existed only in a social context, between us and not just within us. We either grant it to each other or we all lose our humanity altogether. 

While it is true that having been granted humanity by our families and larger society we can, in the face of great adversity and denial, cling to it. But we can see in history how quickly it is lost in a dehumanizing society.   

We cannot remain human if we do not grant others their humanity through our words and deeds. And we cannot hold on to our humanity if deprived from its source in the words and deeds of others. Humanity exists between us, and between us we create it and sustain it.

In the United States today we live in a social context in which the process of giving and receiving our shared humanity is increasingly fragile. More and more of us are working either in dehumanizing environments or are living and working detached from our fellow humans. With the rise of AI we increasingly oversee or are managed by computers. Human teams are and will continue to be replaced by virtual teams. 

But our use of technology is only a symptom of our problem, which is well described in the New Testament.

Too many of us have exchanged conformity to the Law for actual humanity in either ourselves or others. We imagine that humans are biological machines whose humanity resides in their smooth functioning according to a pre-determined set of rules.  We think we have the rule book, and that if we just follow it and insist it be followed humanity will somehow emerge. We imagine a world in which robots are human because we've reduced our humanity to being complex robots. 

We need to be saved.

The single method for evangelism that stretches back to Jesus himself and his apostles is the formation of communities dedicated to mutual humanization, the affirmation of the image of God, the Spirit of Christ, in one another. The local church is the central act of evangelism, because in its life as a human community it is committed to this fundamentally human and humane task that is the gospel, the good news. 

We may extend that humanizing work to those beyond the church, and should, but always and only with the invitation to find in community an enduring humanity. Whether that community is our community is less important than that humans find their humanity in community. In fact it may be better if people are restored to the community in which they were first formed as humans.   

For this reason what happens in the local church is not personal evangelism. It is interpersonal evangelism. We make one another human or no one becomes human. A mass invitation for anonymous people to follow Christ is not humanizing, and may be quite the opposite. Absent interpersonal evangelism it usually assembles an army of zealots gathered behind a charismatic leader; an army that at best dissipates on the leader's death and at worst does much worse under the leader's direction. 

The good news is that the work of creating Christian communities, of creating local churches, doesn't require extraordinary charismatic leaders. Nor does it require rapid growth or media savvy. It doesn’t require an excellent physical facility, great preaching, or flawless ritual worship. It can take place in a small town with a declining population as easily as a growing city or suburb. All it requires is a group of people who invite their neighbors to come and discover what it means to be human together in light of the Gospel that God became a human and lived among us in order to restore our humanity.  

 

Next blog post: Why eschatological thinking may be what saves the human race.